Jonny Tanna presents Midnight Cinema, a project of collaborative activity that utilises and assembles a mix of outsider and emerging artists whose diverse practices are brought together to form a blended participatory occupation of both the gallery and online space.

Midnight Cinema spawned from a frustration with the slow-drip effects of cultural terror induced by a dirge of contemporary mainstream music and the overt commercialism of video games by gaming companies whose primary concern is please the stockholders by charging monthly fees to enable users to simulate war on an assumed cultural enemy. The project identifies this mainstream cultural indoctrination and contrasts that with a nostalgia for a seemingly innocent AV/gaming experience of the recent past. Highlighting a concern for the effect of this onslaught of rampant commercialisation on modern culture, Midnight Cinema wages a battle to dissect and reconstitute contemporary culture, creating a rallying call for change.

Midnight Cinema is the first of a chronicle of gallery takeover shows under the banner Harlesden High Street, that engages with a process of development Jonny Tanna has faced working between pre and post internet artists through a collaborative platforming that enables dialogue between various sub-cultures and generations, and consequently informs the viewer of recent cultural dynamics and histories that have otherwise been overlooked by the rapid developments in throwaway culture.

In pursuit of the idea that being self-serving is inherently self-defeating and that art belongs to no-one and everyone, the collaborative aspects that run throughout the project embrace multiple possibilities for the assimilation of new artworks. A fascination with approaching and dissecting the production of group ideas into form becomes apparent through the structure of the exhibition. In a complex overlaying of the content of an artists production, Midnight Cinema exposes itself as a mechanism for coping with the vulnerability of the artistic self by repurposing cultural layering into new forms of content that relate to the contemporary contexts in which we find ourselves thrown.